Finding Jesus

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
December 5, 2010 (2nd Sunday of Advent)

1.  It’s only been two Sundays now since our celebration of Christ the King, but the image of kingdom, of a just and timeless reign of God’s love, is pretty much a constant in the scriptural witness.  We can’t just talk about kingship of Christ once a year and be done with it.  In fact, Advent continues to be a great time to discuss the promise of Christ’s eternal reign since in Advent we wait for Christ to come again and usher in the justice, peace, and love of his kingdom.  Of course, one of the other reasons we like to think about Christ as a leader—at any time of year—is because our own leaders, even the good ones, could really stand to improve drastically.  In this vein, Rev. Tod Mundo writes:

George Washington's likeness appears on our dollar bills and our quarters, and he is revered as the Father of Our Country. George Washington owned slaves. Andrew Jackson was one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson promised the Choctaw and Cherokee peoples, "they shall possess [their land] as long as Grass grows or water runs"; when gold was discovered on their lands, his forgot his promises and drove them from their lands so that the white people could prosper. Theodore Roosevelt was a man with a reputation larger than life, and his face is carved on Mt. Rushmore. Theodore Roosevelt pushed the notorious Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution, thereby stealing a measure of Cuba's sovereignty under the pretense of caring about the Cuban people. Great leaders sometimes have great faults. Poor leaders sometimes have even greater faults. Jim Hightower quips, "If God had meant for people to vote, he would have given us candidates."

The leaders in the Bible, with the one obvious exception of Jesus, are not too hot either.  King David is an adulterer and a murderer, his son Solomon has absolutely no self-control, the other kings of Israel and Judah mostly betray God and the religion of their ancestors.  In the New Testament, we have King Herod and Pontius Pilate not to mention all the other Roman authorities who keep Paul in and out of jail. 

Since the Bible, we Christians have long had a problematic relationship with our earthly leaders.  Worship professor Christian Scharen suggests that, “The worst moments in the long history of God’s people across history come to pass when leaders throw their lot in with the politically powerful.  Solomon and Herod are obvious examples, but so are church leaders in Germany during National Socialism or in Chile during the reign of Augusto Pinochet.  Year after year, people watch their rulers again succumb to corruption, greed, and power—some more, some less.”

2.  Psalm 72 must have been written by a poet that knew very well that earthly kings and leaders—and any collaboration between faithful people and those leaders—was usually marked by sinful missteps, faithlessness, and subjugation of the powerless.  The psalm, however, takes a hopeful approach:  instead of bemoaning how bad almost all kings have been, it focuses rather on a perfect future king who governs with justice for the poor and commitment to the well-being of all people.  The psalm itself is wonderfully positive about the king, and the son of the king.  Hearing this psalm with Christian ears, one immediately thinks of Jesus sitting on the throne of heaven.  In the words of the psalm, this king judges the “people with righteousness and the poor with justice.”  Under his rule, “the mountains yield prosperity for the people.”  It’s an amazing vision.  The king we await in these darkening days of December will finally be a good leader, the best leader.  One commentator on Psalm 72 wondered wistfully, What would it be like if all of our leaders today had to pass this acid test to be considered good leaders?  What if they had to bring justice to the poor and prosperity to the people?  It’s all too easy in today’s world to forget that we can and ought to expect more from those who aspire to serve us as leaders.  And continuing on a theme I started to discuss last week, wouldn’t it be amazing if we measured prosperity not in terms of gross accumulation of wealth but in terms of true and equitable well-being for all people?  Way back in 1968, Bobby Kennedy made this appeal.  He said:

Too much and too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product…--if we should judge America by that--…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl….Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures…everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

3.  Psalm 72, as well as the other scripture readings we heard this morning from Isaiah and from Matthew’s gospel describe a future leader, a Christ, who will not measure prosperity or justice in the corrupt and limited terms of wealth and greed.  He will bring with him a peace and justice that far surpasses our meager expectations.  He will be like the “rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.  In his days…righteousness will flourish and peace [will] abound, until the moon is no more.”  The question of Advent is:  How do we wait?  How can we wait for Jesus to come and make the words of promise in Psalm 72 come true?  First, we look at the gospel of a Lord who has already come.  We pattern our lives after Jesus’ life and ministry while we wait, and we hope for a future where what God has started in Jesus comes  to a final and beautiful fullness.  Two great Methodist thinkers, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon encourage us to do just this when they write, “The church is on the long haul, living in that difficult time between one advent and the next.  In such times, we are all the more dependent on a community that tells us we live between the times, that it is all too easy to lose sight of the way the world is, now that God has come.  Because we know something about the direction in which it is moving, we are encouraged by that picture and guided by the shape of its depiction of the way things are now that God has redeemed the world in Jesus.”

As John the Baptist teaches in our gospel reading from this morning, one greater than all of us is coming, one whose sandals we are not worthy to carry.  But in the meantime, as we await this wonderful incarnation of God, John reminds us that is our job in the here and now to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”  In other words, while we place our ultimate hope in the coming Christ, in the interim we do his work.  We love as he loves, we ally ourselves with justice and mercy, we serve the needy, the oppressed and the poor, and we look to Jesus as our moral exemplar. 

4.  To do that, we need to go to where Christ is now.  Jesus, from his birth, lived with the poor, the sick, and those in need.  Psalm 72 asks that the king “defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.”  We consider Jesus to be this king because he did and will do just that.  South African pastor Peter Storey was once addressing a group of well-off American church people.  He said something to them that I’m sure had to sting, but it is utterly true.  He said, “Those…churches struggling in places of poverty and injustice are fortunate—they are already where Jesus is.  Those who have become prosperous must find Him again.”  In our prosperity and comfort, our challenge this Advent is to go to where Jesus is, among the poor and the downtrodden.  What can you do in this season to find him?  How can you move yourself to a place where you can encounter the king of justice among the poor?  Can you give from your abundance to the needy?  Can you write letters to our leaders to encourage them to enact legislation that protects Jesus’ beloved?  Can you pray that the world will be transformed?  Can you pray that Jesus come and really want it, for your own sake and for the sake of all those on this earth who desperately need deliverance?  I’ve said it from this pulpit before but allow me to say it again:  God doesn’t help those who help themselves.  God helps those who can’t help themselves.  And you have been called to minister in Jesus’ name.  Find way to serve the poor, find a way to serve the lonely, find a way to share your prosperity, and you will find the king of peace.  You will find Jesus.  Amen. 

Thrones of Judgment

Psalm 122
November 28, 2010 (1st Sunday of Advent)

1.  It is my intention to focus our attention during this season of Advent on the Psalms that occur in the lectionary readings.  These ancient songs of temple, synagogue, and church—I hope—will provide us with just the right music for this time of expectation and preparation.  So, to get started, let me share with you a song that has become a favorite around our house, and, if I may modestly admit it, I wrote it myself.  I wrote the song as a response to my children’s frequent conviction that my decisions are not fair, or that their lives are too difficult, or that not all of their needs and wants are being met quickly enough.  The song goes like this:

There is no justice on this earth!

There is no justice on this earth!

There is no justice, there is no justice,

There is no justice on this earth!

My kids don’t really care for this song, but I like it a lot.  For me, it revives ancient themes, ones that we often see in the Psalms themselves.  When the people of Israel look around at their position among the nations, they see that they are small to the point of insignificance, and all too often they are conquered and hauled off into exile.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, their songs lament the lack of justice on earth, but they also imagine a different world where there is justice.  A world where God is in charge in the holy city of Jerusalem, and things are the way they ought to be. 

2.  In Psalm 122, which we sang this morning, the psalmist finds joy in going to the house of the Lord because in that house, it is possible to imagine a world where God’s justice is the norm rather than the exception.  The words of the psalm asks us to pray for the peace and prosperity of Jerusalem. 

Of course, for the ancient Israelites as well as for many today, Jerusalem is the centerpiece of God’s creation.  It is the holy city where God is most pleased to dwell, the home of the ancient Hebrew temple, the home of Jesus passion and resurrection, and the home of the Dome of the Rock, one of the most revered places in Islam. 

And members of all three of these religions have longed after peace for Jerusalem even as all of them have also been guilty of bringing strife and warfare to this same city.  Jerusalem today is one of the most fraught places on the planet.  Everyone seems to want the city for themselves to the exclusion of others, and perhaps this is how they feel about our God as well.  We want God for ourselves in such a way that limits God’s potential affection for or relationship with other people. 

Jerusalem, in this way, becomes much more than one particular geographical city.  It rises to be the ideal place where all history comes together and God’s promises come true.  It is the place where people from all over the earth metaphorically pin their hopes and dreams, and it is for this reason that the psalmist’s appeal to us to go up and be happy worshiping God in Jerusalem is such a timeless hymn.  At the end of the seder meal at Passover, our Jewish brothers and sisters proclaim with hope:  “Next year in Jerusalem!”  Most have no sense that they will go to the earthly city called Jerusalem, the one that straddles the border between the modern political entities of Israel and West Bank.  They instead refer to the Jerusalem of promise, the holy city where God lives, the mount of Zion where ancient hungers are satisfied, where justice flows down like a stream, where swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks, where we will learn war no more. 

3.  What marks our longing for this heavenly Jerusalem is our shared conviction that this will be a place that will feature both justice and peace.  We have a sense that justice and peace ought to be related somehow—after all, most of our towns have an elected position called “the justice of the peace” who is responsible for keeping order by settling disputes.  We know, instinctively maybe, that if we have justice, we will also have peace.  But there is plenty in our world to suggest the opposite.  Plenty of judgments are made everyday in our modern world that disturb the peace.  I refer to judgments which concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, judgments which choose knowingly to pollute the environment, judgments to make war instead of to seek peace, judgments that divide the powerful from the weak, the haves from the have-nots.  These kinds of so-called justice drive a wedge between people and make peace seem like a far-away fantasy.  But we know, as the psalmist knew, as the prophets knew, and as Jesus himself knew that true and godly justice will go hand in hand with peace.  For this reason, we can understand where the psalmist was coming from when he imagined a city where “thrones of judgment” were set up.  When the one doing the judging is the source of all creation and the author of justice, this is good news indeed.  This judge creates a city so just that no more harm is done, no more alienation occurs, no more oppression is possible.  In the purview of these thrones of justice, peace spreads.  No wonder the psalmist seems to equate the practice of justice with the act of making peace as well as with the liturgical praise of the people.  Justice-seeking equals peace-making equals praise-singing. 

4.  In front of these thrones of judgment, the sinful divisions we create unfairly between ourselves are done away with and we are all able to worship with freedom and human equality before our God.  In this act of justice, we find peace, but Psalm 122 also suggests that in this justice we will also find prosperity.  This prosperity is utterly unknown in our world, however.  Sure, there are plenty of people who are well-off today, but unlike earthly wealth, the prosperity in the psalm is not won at anyone else’s expense.  Biblical prosperity is not the accumulation of wealth in a system of scarcity.  It is rather the fair and equitable sharing of God’s gifts to us.  In this season of heightened consumerism and continuous demands that we buy more and spend more and live always at the edge if not beyond our means, it is instructive to remember that the prosperity and peace that are imagined in the Bible do not resign some people to poverty and dependence.  The peace of the house of God, where God’s justice reigns, is the kind of peace that restores the dignity of all people, that brings low the mighty and raises up the lowly; it is the dignity that comes unexpectedly both in a manger and in glory. 

5.  So, the psalmist says, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem—built as a city that is bound firmly together.”

When these words are intoned, who is it that belongs within Jerusalem’s gates?  Who is being invited to enter into this city of justice, where all is bound so firmly together?  Is it for us pious Christians gathered here this morning?  Is it for the holy?  Who can come into this city chosen by God?  In other words, who receives God’s promises?  To whom do they apply?  When Jesus says he came to seek out and restore the lost, to whom was he referring?  I suppose the thrones of judgment are for all people, ready or not.  For some, they will mean a reversal of fortune.  But for all people, the promise stands:  God’s justice will bring peace. 

6.  Well, you may be saying to yourself, “What does all this have to do with Jesus?  What does any of this have to do with Advent?”  Advent is a time when we affirm that the world can change.  Not by our own labors, but as the psalmist suggests, by the arrival of a just judge to sit on the thrones of judgment.  When Christ comes to reconcile the world for once and for all with God, the world will change.  The injustices, the grief, the inequality, will be set right.  Peace and true prosperity will reign.  We Christians must live off of this Advent hope.  It is like a song that has gotten stuck in our heads, and we can’t shake it.  We believe Christ can and will change the world. This is our story, this is our song.  Soon, little Avery Elizabeth will be baptized, and her own life will become part of this song of hope.  In her, as in all of us baptized, ancient promises are being answered.  As we await the coming of the Christ, let us see ourselves as we truly are.  Let us prepare ourselves for praise, for justice, and for peace-making.  I began with a cynical song about the lack of justice on this earth that I sing to my children.  Let us end with the hope that all of us—even our little children—will realize a new song of gladness, justice, and peace.  Amen.